ENGLISH LEARNING STRATEGIES
USED BY MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS OF INSAN CENDEKIA AL MUJTABA JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
PUBLICATION JOURNAL Completed as One of Regulations
for Getting Master Degree of English Language Study
by
BETA HIMA MAHAYU S 200 140 017
POST GRADUATE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDY MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF SURAKARTA
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A. INTRODUCTION
Fromkin stated that, “English has been called the lingua franca of the
world” (1990: 259). As a lingua franca, it can be inferred that English is an
international language used in every sector of life globally, such as politics, education, science, tourism, business, and many other ventures which interest them. The fact that English is used as an international language, it is a tool of communication that plays an important role in the international communication and make it becomes very important to be mastered. In order to be mastered in English, people have to acquire it informally or formally. English becomes a second language when it is learned by Indonesia. English also becomes one of the compulsory subjects which is learnt and taught of all education levels at schools in Indonesia. It means that the students should be mastered four integrated skills in English that cannot be separated, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Each skill has their own difficulties because every part needs exposure to make it better.
writing. Each skill has their own difficulties because every part needs exposure to make it better.
One of the activities done in many teaching learning process is learning English. For every people, it is not easy to learn English well especially for Indonesian that only use it as a second language. There are many difficulties face by the students when they learn English as a foreign language. According to Brown (1997: 7) learning is acquiring or getting knowledge of a subject or a skill by studying, experience or instruction.
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language. The factors above focus to the learners’ characteristics which influence their language learning achievement.
Students need strategies to learn English. According to Oxford (1987: 78), learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective and more transferrable to new situations. Chamot (2005: 112) state that strategies are the produces making easier to learn something, especially language learning. Oxford (1992: 18) state that strategies are tools for self-directed involvement necessary for developing communicative ability. So, learning strategies are person approaches to learning and using information. It is one of the main factors that help determine how and how well the students learn English as a foreign language.
According to Mayer (in Witrock, 1986: 45), learning strategies as behaviors and thoughts that learning engages in during learning and that are intended to influence the learner’s encoding process. It is simply refers to an
task at hand, these strategies become a useful toolkit for active, conscious, and purposeful self-regulation of learning.
Nowadays, there are many things that usually occur at school, such as the teaching-learning process which is un-effective, the material which is difficult, the male students’ score and the female students’ score which are different, and so on.
One of factors that often occur is the difference score between male and female students. The difference here means that the male students’ score is not as good as
the female students’.
Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School is a boarding school that separate the class based on gender. The male students have their own class and so do the female students. Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School has twelve classes, namely: class seven consists of two male classes and two female classes, class eight consists of two male classes and two female classes, and class nine consists of two male classes and two female classes. This separation make the writer easily analyzes the differences between male and female, and the English progress between male and female in learning English.
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strategies used by male and female students. So that, it make the description clearer with it.
Based on pre-observation that had been conducted at Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School, the writer found the different score between male and female students. Female students always get better score of the average and they are more active than male students. In fact, both of them get the same external supporters such as material, books, process of learning, and many more. The phenomenon above make the writer suggests that the difference score between male and female is caused by the difference learning strategies used by male and female students that they had chosen to learn and understand English as a foreign language. As a consequence, male students learn more passively, get worse score than the female, then fail at school.
Based on the explanation above, the writer is interested in observing learning strategies of English used by male and female students in Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School. The researcher focused on the eight grade of male and female students. The researcher wants to research the students of the English class from their behavior in learning English as their learning strategies.
B. RESEARCH METHOD
1. Type of the Study
The writer carries out a qualitative research in this research. According to Bogdan and Taylor (1987) in Moeloeng (1983: 3), the qualitative research is a research which yields the descriptive data in the form of written or oral words from observing people and behavior. In this research, the writer tries to describe the English learning strategies used by male and female students at the eight grade of Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School in 2015/2016 especially the type of learning strategy, the dominant learning strategy, the similarities and the differences learning strategy used by male and female students.
2. Subject of the Study
The study is conducted at Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School. It focuses on the eight grade of Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School in 2015/2016 academic year. The total participants are 50 students consist of 25 male students and 25 female students.
3. Object of the Study
The object of this research is the learning strategies of English used by male and female students at the eight grade of Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School in 2015/2016 academic year.
4. Data and Data Source
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The data of this research are the activities of the students taken from field note and observation. There are three source of the data, namely: informant, documentation, and event.
C. RESEARCH FINDING AND DISCUSSION
After finishing the research, the writer broke down the data into some categories related to the learning strategies of English then analyzed them using SPSS 15.0. In this case, the writer discusses the research findings which compared to the research finding of the previous researchers. The writer also discusses the theory and the findings of the recent research whether those are having similarities and differences or not.
Compared to the previous study, this study has significant learning to get a good achievement in learning English. In the previous study, the researcher focuses on English learning strategy for learning English. Moreover, the previous study has significant attention on one or two learning strategy. They also have different theory of analysis compared to this research. This currect study’s finding is different from the research finding of Martinez’s, Aslan’s, Bobanovic and
Mircovic’s, Zeynali’s, Alhaisoni’s, Ozyilmaz’s, Kayaoglu’s, Sholicah’s, and
Tam’s.
strategy, affective strategy, and social strategy. The strategy is based on the theory of Oxford learning strategy. This research belongs to qualitative research which describes the type of learning strategies and dominant learning strategies used by male and female students at the eight grade of Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School.
In this research, the researcher used questionnaire and interview for collecting the data. The researcher proposed four problem statements, which are the type of learning strategies, the dominant learning strategies, the similarities of learning strategies, and the differences of learning strategies used by male and female at the eight grade of Insan Cendekia Al Mujtaba Junior High School.
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similarities, there are the differences of learning startegies used by male and female students are most of female students did not use compensation strategy and used affective strategy, whereas most of male students used compensation strategy but did not use affective strategy.
